Tag Archives: travel

Oh my stars and garters. I’ve been going like a maniac for days now. Friday–Halloween party. Saturday–trip through a Haunted House. Sunday–groceries, laundry, pizza, as well as prepping for the Kick Off Party. Monday–the Kick Off party! Tuesday–taking John to tae kwon do. And of course Wednesday was Halloween!

People ask me how I get any writing done. It’s simple. I do it whenever I get the chance. On Tuesday I was sitting there with my notebook on my knee writing while John was out on the mat with his tae kwon do class. At this point I’m busy typing in everything I wrote during #nanoprep in October. Still, I must keep writing every day. That’s the deal.

We’re going to EuCon again this month. John is once again in charge of the Art Bus. This means five days on the road. It will be a real challenge making sure I hit the daily quota when my brain is fried from driving for hours or working the con. I’ve already proven I can write in my sleep, so I might need that skill again and soon!

Then there’s John’s birthday and Thanksgiving! The excitement never stops!

I’m going to write. Every day. A whole new book.

To all my fellow WriMos out there, I wish you all the best as you embark on your journeys of creativity.

One of the most important elements of a fantasy novel or a game world is the magic system. A logical and consistent magic system will do a lot to help improve the quality of the story… A better magic system means a better story, and a better story means more readers!

PLENTY OF FORMATS TO CHOOSE FROM!

EPUB MOBI PDF IRL PDB TXT HTML

Whether you’re a writer or a gamer, a graphic novelist or an historical reenactor, The Writer’s Spellbook will give you step by step guidance in making the crucial decisions that will bring your fantasy world to life.

I remember these terms from my Economics and Accounting classes. Little did I know I would one day be applying them to which writing projects I chose to pursue.

So far, the Flower Maiden Saga has inspired me to write three consecutive novels. The farther I go in editing and polishing Book One for the big agent pitch, the more of the causes and consequences of the main storyline I see. The core plots for Books Four and Five have already presented themselves.

This is wonderful. I’m excited about all of it. The thing is, my first love is writing short stories. Reading short stories in Asimov’s and Weird Tales and my English Lit. classes made me want to become a writer. The first time I walked into a bookstore and picked up a copy of The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI and saw my name on the table of contents right there with Ramsey Campbell and Ed Gorman, I very nearly exploded with happiness.

Short stories are great, but novels are where the money is. I’ve heard that many times. Novels take a while to write and a while to polish and package for publication. Not so with short stories. Short stories will get your name out there and keep it out there.

These are the five main perils of writing short fiction:

Why waste a good idea on a short story? These days it’s all about writing novels. Give the readers what they want, over and over again. Build that brand. Make more money. Fine. If that’s what you want, go for it. Bear in mind there is much to be said for the art and craft of the short story. Hemingway’s “The Killers” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” remain vivid in my mind thirty-five years after I read them in high school.

Short stories are often just one shots. That one shot might be brilliant, but then you have to go write another story. Is that one brilliant story continuing to earn royalties or selling well as a Kindle Single? I visit various writers’ groups online, and I find the emphasis on money to be disheartening. Short stories can be built into a novel. One of my favorite fantasy novels, A Bait of Dreams by Jo Clayton, started out as three short stories that appeared in Asimov’s.

It can be difficult to pack a complex story idea into a limited word count. On the other hand, doing so can result in a stronger story. When I wrote “Fallen Idol,” my first short story sale, I got so caught up in all the research and characters and how-to books’ advice I thought I could rise to the challenge of writing a real novel. Fortunately, I had an attack of reality. All the research and ideas imploded, resulting in a much stronger short story.

Unless you’re selling to the top professional markets, short fiction doesn’t pay much. If you’re sending out enough stories to generate an acceptable amount of sales, way to go! That’s not easy to do, even for the Big Names. I will say that anthologies that pay up front then give you a cut of the royalties can provide some worthwhile income.

Here’s the Peril that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a writer. Are you going to write about what you want to write about, or are you going to write what you think will sell to the markets where you want your work to appear? The Digital Age has opened up a whole lot of markets. They may not pay much. They may not pay at all. Still, you can get your words out there. Targeting a particular market is a perfectly reasonable career strategy. My first sale to Weird Tales was another day for joyful explosion.

It comes down to those basic questions we all ask our main characters:

What do you want?

How badly do you want it?

What are you willing to give up in order to get it?

When you’ve answered these three questions, you will be on your way to navigating through the perilous process of telling the stories only you can tell.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

— Flannery O’Connor

You don’t have to be writing a memoir to take a look at your own life and see what might be useful in your stories. We’re supposed to write what we know, right? Who could possibly tell the stories we’ve lived through better than we can? Let me offer a few highlights from my own adventures.

1. I’ve been dead. Yes, that’s right, D-E-A-D. On August 29, 1987 I died in a car accident on Interstate 5 heading north. I was driving my boss’ station wagon from Long Beach, CA to Black Point in Novato, CA, former site of the Northern Renaissance Faire. The two right tires blew within seconds of each other. The car went out of control and rolled two and half times, coming to rest on the roof. My body was found on I-5 South, across a forty-five foot culvert. Who found me? A LVN and an Air Force Paramedic. What they were doing driving south on I-5 in the middle of the night, I have no idea. They called it in and tried to get an Air Ambulance, but the nearest ones were still too far away. An ambulance from Bakersfield, CA came out, the paramedics scraped me up off the highway, and took me to Kaiser in Bakersfield. I regained consciousness three days later in the ICU. Do I remember being dead? Yes I do.

2. When I was in kindergarten, I was chosen to play Santa Claus because I was already taller than everybody else in my class with the exception of the teacher. This was my first appearance on stage, and I liked it. Costumes, theatrics, the performing arts, and Christmas have all played central roles in many of my more noteworthy adventures. I trace it all back to cross-dressing as Kris Kringle when I was just six years old.

3. I was in high school when my best friend Andrew decided somebody deserved his wrath in the form of toilet-papering his or her house. I’d never done this particular prank before, so I was all for it. That was my first mistake. Neither of us had a car, so we contrived an elaborate plan that involved the two of us going to the movies and getting a ride from my mother. We were within walking distance of our target. How we got our hands on all the toilet paper we needed I can’t quite recall. I remember walking out of a grocery store with my arms full of the big multi-roll packages. I trusted Andrew to get us to our target. That was my second mistake. We had a high old time, festooning the trees and pitching rolls over the rooftop and draping the car in the driveway with much hygenic bunting. The occasional car would drive by, forcing us to dive behind the nearest hedge or bush or bumper. Now if we’d been really evil, we would have gone looking for the garden hose and soaked it all. That makes toilet paper almost impossible to clean up. We congratulated ourselves on a job well done and took off to meet our ride at the movie theater. The next day at school, the story about the toilet papering was the hot topic of the day. Everyone wanted to know who did it. Everyone also wanted to know why that particular house was chosen. Nobody who went to our school lived there. Andrew had missed his target by a good two blocks.

4. From age sixteen to eighteen, I studied Turkish-Moroccan bellydancing. My teacher was a wonderful lady from Saragossa, Spain. As I improved and occasionally taught a class for her, my teacher would take me with her on what were then called “belly grams.” These were singing telegrams, except of course they were delivered by belly dancers. One night near Christmas my teacher called me up out of the blue and asked if I could come with her on a party call. (Nobody with any sense ever goes on these jobs alone.) It was one of my father’s visitation weekends, so I was at his house, but it didn’t take long to get into my costume and jewelry. My teacher had been hired for a bachelor party in an extremely high class neighborhood. One piece of art on the walls there would have put me through college. There were about ten men there in the game room, which featured a wet bar, a pool table, and one of those cone-shaped gas fireplaces in the corner. It’s not easy to work a room when the best you can do is work your way around the pool table, but we had a good time. The guest of honor and his friends were good tippers, I’ll say that for them. At one point I was shimmying past a fellow who’d been holding a cold beer. He chose that moment to tuck some folded money down the back of my coin belt. I all but shot straight up to the ceiling! When our time was up, my teacher and I made a graceful exit. We heard later there were two more acts after us. Those guys really were generous. At home again, I was taking off my costume and money was spilling out all over the place. I do not want to tell you where I found the ten dollar bill!

5. The week I spent in Yokohama, Japan for the 2007 World Science Fiction Convention has supplied me with so many stories I could write a book with a story for every chapter. There was the wonderful security guard who helped me and my best friend find the post office where the international ATMs were kept. The reception held by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan was the most fabulous event I’ve ever attended, complete with the U.S. Ambassador from the Ministry of Trade and the Mayor of Yokohama. I met my friend Massimo there, the gentleman from Torino, Italy who edits ALIA and translates Japanese into Italian. I had a conversation in Japanese with a cat, who answered me. When we were trying to find the Yokohama Hard Rock Cafe, a nice young man offered to show us where it was once his mother came back. Sure enough, they led us all the way through the very extensive shopping mall to the very doorstep of the Cafe. I love Japan. I can’t wait to go back and see what further adventures await me.

So you see? What might seem like a trivial incident to you can become the basis for a story. I could take the Santa Claus moment and make it the reason my heroine feels safer when she’s inside a costume. The toilet paper incident could become a case of mistaken identity that snowballs into a horrible climax of payback. The bellydancing lends itself to all kinds of stories. Humor, romance, espionage, woman in danger, cultural exchange! All of those could also arise from my adventures in Japan.

Because I lived through all the above events, I know how it felt to wear the costumes, to live in fear of the police showing up, to trust my teacher to keep me safe in what could have become a dangerous situation. Japan was wonderful, but there were moments when I was lost, and no one around me understood a word I said. I walked into one restaurant and the waiter said, “No English.” I knew he meant more than just the language. That brings to mind the weekend bus tour I took to Paris when I spent the summer living in Holland. The tour guide we picked up in Paris didn’t like Americans. The Dutch ladies on the bus closed ranks around me and made it clear the tour guide had better mind her manners. The negative experiences might have more power than the positive ones. That’s up to each of us to decide.

We cannot approach our lives with a poverty mentality. Every day we’ve been alive has been full of sound and color and emotion and meaning. Look for the moments that stand out, for the memories still charged with emotion and intensity. Take that raw material and reshape it into the inciting incident, the problem situation, the change in the status quo that launches your main character on his or her struggle to solve the problem. Use those moments for complications, for crises, for climaxes. You will be surprised to learn how much you really do know.

By now you’re thinking, “She’s got to be running out of ideas. Soon she’ll have to just start making things up!” Well, that day is NOT today! There is in fact a chocolate roller rink, and it’s located in Canela, Brazil.

” We stop at a cute shop and I quickly fill boxes with chocolate of all kinds for my American friends. The cashier tells us to make sure we head upstairs to see what is up there before retreating to our car. Of course our curiosity is heightened and we head up past
the chocolate waterfall and life size chocolate figures. We come to a room with music playing. After further investigation, we see two kids ice skating, but this is no regular rink – the kids are skating on chocolate. Yes chocolate. I watch a while and think of putting on a pair of skates myself, but it is a small rink and we have more of Canela to see.”

Yes, folks, the Brazilians are so cool they have even created a skating rink for kids where the floor is pure chocolate. I ask you, did you ever think you’d see something this cool?

Now tell me this: if you could build an entertainment location out of chocolate, what would it be? Miniature golf? Bowling? The kind of games you play on the midway at the State Fair? Come on! Let’s hear some ideas!

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Finding My Fiction

Who I Am

I'm a professional writer living in Northern California with my husband and two sons. Fantasy in various forms is my reading and writing pleasure. I'm a history buff, a Japanophile, and I love to learn about language(s). I enjoy making jewelry, using natural materials such as wood, bone, semiprecious stones, and seashells. I collect bookmarks and wind chimes.